The Airbus A380

Qantas Airways and Singapore Airlines have grounded their fleets of Airbus A380 superjumbo passenger jets after the engine of one of Qantas’ A380s exploded following takeoff from Singapore earlier today. The A380, which is a double-decker jet and the largest passenger airliner in the world, first entered service in 2007. In the spring of that year, when the A380 made its maiden flight to New York, Andrew Blum wrote a Talk of the Town story about a group of plane-spotters who gathered in North Woodmere Park, which is situated at the head of Jamaica Bay, to watch its arrival at John F. Kennedy International Airport.

“It’s a prettier plane than I thought it would be,” Lynda Smith, a flight attendant from Long Island, said. “This is just one of those events that you’ve got to watch. It’s so simple. We came, we saw, we went home.”

The year before, James Surowiecki wrote about the plane’s troubled development in a Financial Page column on the company’s flagging sales compared with those of its chief competitor, Boeing:

Airbus is struggling to find customers for the new plane on which it has staked its future, the superjumbo A380, as airlines wonder whether anyone wants to fly on a jet that seats almost six hundred people. The A380s that have already been ordered will be delivered late, thanks to production snafus that may add as much as $2.6 billion to the original development cost of thirteen billion dollars.

At the time, Surowiecki warned that we should “give Airbus a few more years of floundering before we decide that it should be put out of its misery.” Thursday’s incident won’t help.